Wednesday, March 24, 2010

INTIMIDATORS, INTIMIDATOR-WANNABES, AND THE RACE CARD

Rachel Maddow did a terrific report last night on the rock and brick attacks -- five so far -- that have taken place in response to the health care vote:

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As she notes (in the report and on her blog), an Alabama attention junkie named Mike Vanderboegh has taken credit for the attacks; he wrote a blog post on Friday telling "modern Sons of Liberty" that if they want to "send a message that Pelosi and her party cannot fail to hear," they should "break their windows."

Now Vanderboegh seems like a pathetic old punk, a guy who calls for insurrection but probably doesn't have the guts to attempt himself. However, as Maddow notes, he's scheduled to be a speaker at an "open carry" rally in Virginia on April 19 -- anniversary of the Waco conflagration and the Oklahoma City bombing. And, well, imagine my surprise when I go to a discussion thread recommending signs for the rally and I see, in addition to this one, which is not entirely unexpected....



...the following sign, which one attendee says he's planning to carry:



For easy reading, I'll type out a few of "founding principles for restoring the Confederacy":

1. Christianity is the predominant religion of the South, hence the South is a Christian nation....
3. English is the language of the South.
4. The South's culture, historically, was, and still is today, a Christian Celtic culture....


Yikes.

(Click the image to read the rest.)

Oh, and in Mr. Vanderboegh's "'Choose this day whom you will serve.': An Open Letter to American Law Enforcement," posted last month in an effort to encourage police officers to consider defying the government (also a goal of the tea party-linked Oath Keepers), we have this:

... The Justice Department's National Gang Intelligence Center estimated last year that there were over a million hard-core gang members in this country who were responsible for over 80% of the crimes in many communities. Other experts have suggested that when you add in the gangs' "extended families" and wannabes the number is closer to between five and ten million. As unemployment has increased, their numbers have likewise swelled....

What will happen when we are faced, God forbid, with some dislocating national disaster -- natural or man-made -- that makes Katrina look like a kindergarten playground?...

You -- ALL of you -- law enforcement officers, will then need us, the armed citizenry -- ALL of us willing and competent to muster -- to defend public order against the tide of chaos represented by five or ten million gang members and the tens of millions of panicked unprepared refugees or opportunistic criminals left unrestrained by a breakdown....


These folks worry about plenty of other things. But it's not surprising at all to me that fear of urban gangs and a desire to restore the Confederacy's "Celtic" culture are never far from their minds.

****

And just to show that right-wing crazies can play the race card several different ways, here's Instapundit linking a clip of white blogger Dana Loesch -- yeah, the Andrew Breitbart writer who compared the health care vote to 9/11 -- whining on Bill O'Reilly's show about African American members of Congress who reported racial epithets ... while wearing a Public Enemy shirt.



I assume that eventually a Caucasian member of this movement will say that the movement's members are society's new n***ers -- oh, wait, that happened already, didn't it?

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